Sony VAIO Fit E 15 Review and Ratings

Editors’ Rating:

Our Verdict:
Its 1080p touch screen looks great, its keyboard is comfortable, and its audio is impressive. But the VAIO Fit E 15's all-plastic shell leaves a bit to be desired, especially for the $899 asking price of our test configuration. Read More…

Sony VAIO Fit E 15 Review

Introduction & Design

With so much of the PC world focused on ultrabooks and convertibles lately, it's kind of refreshing to spend some time with a traditional laptop.

With its 15.5-inch screen and DVD drive (gasp!), Sony's new VAIO Fit E 15 (model SVF15217CXW) almost feels like a throwback. But our review unit is equipped with a nice 1080p touch screen, Windows 8, and USB 3.0 ports, so it certainly doesn't feel dated. At an inch thick, it's also reasonably thin for a laptop that isn't aiming at ultrabook territory.

But while the VAIO Fit E 15's screen looks great, and its audio output is good and loud, we have some issues with the laptop's build quality, especially for the $899 asking price of our review configuration.

Along with subwoofers, the "E" models in the new VAIO Fit line have plastic exteriors. That's fine if you opt for something like the base model, which starts at $579 for a non-touch screen with a lesser Pentium processor versus our model's Core i5. But $899 is well into ultrabook territory, where aluminum exteriors are the norm.

More worryingly, the lid of our review unit didn't feel rigid enough. Grabbing both sides of the screen, it was very easy to torque or flex the display, despite the glass touch layer on top. And the lid emitted creaking sounds when we did so.

Problems with screen flex aside, the Fit E 15 is a handsome laptop.

This makes it tempting to opt for a model of the VAIO Fit without the E designation. The higher-end, non-E-branded VAIO Fit laptops have sleeker aluminum exteriors, which should provide more rigidity while looking better and being more durable. Stepping up to one of the metal-shelled models also gets you a hybrid hard drive, rather than the 1TB conventional hard drive in our VAIO Fit E 15.

You'll have to pay $100 extra for the privilege of metal and hybrid storage, though, which would push our review unit up to $999. Again, that's a pretty high price for the components you'd be getting.

Sony's own VAIO T Series 15 touch-screen ultrabook can be had with a 1080p display for $850 to $880 as of this writing. We think at this price the ultrabook option makes more sense, especially since, in our testing, the T15 Touch's battery lasted 40 minutes longer than the VAIO Fit E 15's.

Design

Its plastic nature aside, the VAIO Fit E 15 is a good-looking laptop. It's available in three colors: black, pink, and the white model we tested.

The stylized silver VAIO logo sits centered on the lid, below a small Sony logo. Other than that, the design is pretty minimal—in a good way. There are lots of clean, slightly swooping lines, and the laptop is reasonably thin, at about an inch thick. At 6 pounds, though, it's not overly light.

The white of the lid carries over to the keyboard tray and the keyboard as well, although the lower section of the VAIO Fit E 15, including the port area and bottom, is black.